


Laryngeal Legerdemain for Shits and Giggles

by puny



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Multi, Other, Texan voodoo, addiction is a powerful thing, audio drug
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2011-12-11
Updated: 2012-05-27
Packaged: 2017-10-27 05:29:05
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 4,298
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/292106
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/puny/pseuds/puny
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alternians know not the magic of a true Southerner's drawl. Dave opens his facehole and carnage happens.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. In Which Dave is Ear Candy

You are Dave Strider, and what the fuck. 

You, your lovable ectosibling, and the bucktoothed bucaneers (nice going, self, now they sound like a fucking cereal) are on a meteor. Technically, dear sweet Rose tells you, it's a meteoroid, because it hasn't entered the atmospheric outer layers of oh sorry can't hear you past the sound of I don't care. Technically, your mind tells you, you're in a lab that's more labyrinth than lab. It's like being in C3PO's smaller intestine. If C3PO had decided to eat a shitload of little gray-skinned fuckers for brunch and then washed it down with a handful of candy corn that'd snuck by quality control. You're all standing in this circle, like you're at some massively fucked-up summer camp. Anytime now you're all gonna go space kayaking and then learn to set up tents in zero gravity. 

"Hello!" You cannot believe how sproingy Egbert is. He's practically strangling the aliens. Same goes for Jade, who's already giggling so hard her gargantuan front teeth are in danger of detaching. "Hi!!!" Audible fucking exclamation marks. You swear. 

"Hello, everyone. It's a pleasure to see faces instead of text color."You notice your sister keeps looking at the Zen troll. Whoa there, girl, your lesbs is showing. 

"Sup, you little alien fuckers." Welcoming and distinguished. Dave Strider's got it down pa- holy shit.

Every Alternian in the room has snapped to face you. Your fellow humans are confused, but you're rooted to the spot. Rooted, that making you the carrot and every troll in the room Peter Motherfuckin' Rabbit. You fervently hope there's something behind you putting those looks of bewilderment and what you swear is primal goddamn hunger on their sharp troll faces. You turn slowly. 

Nope. Just lab wall and what looks like a unicycle.

You turn back around and Terezi- that has _got_ to be Pyrope, you can see the little Hs and threes floating around her- is grinning. If "grinning" can mean "slowly revealing cavelike maw of fucking carnassials". Now the others are revealing teeth- blunt, pointed, fanged, god did Alternia have even one dentist office- and advancing. 

"What the nephew-fondlin' fuck?" 

And just like that, they look like heroin shooters again. But why the hell-

oh. 

oh, shit, your _voice._


	2. equius

You run. 

You don't care if you're the Knight of Wibbly Wobbly Sci-fi References. Any time lord would look at those alien bear-trap maws and split like a cheap fucking oboe reed. You spin around and take a left, a right, another right and _shit fuck directions you can hear them chasing you._ The almighty gods of not being devoured must be shining on you, because you come to a door with a complicated levers-and-pulleys locking system and you're able to haul the mechanisms fully into place as twenty-four Alternian feet enter the room you were just in. They start sniping at each other, probably trying to figure out where the Dave human went and how best to force him to speak. Lovely fucking welcoming committee. In the room you're in, there's some equipment shit, dead things in jars (your favorite), and at the far end, another one of these heavy-duty doors. Sorry, Egbert, but these doors are your new best friend. You'd continue that metaphor, something involving you and the door braiding each other's hair and making blood pacts, but somebody's abusing the one you just ran through and you sprint off to the second one instead. 

You've almost pulled it closed when there's a sound like Optimus Prime just did a belly flop through nine floors of the Chrysler Building and you realize jesus fucking fuck somebody's fucking ripped that fucking door right off the fucking wall. Room: some screens or some shit, who cares who cares where's the door, thank god there it is what no why won't it open shitfuck oh there's that sound again you should probably turn around and

shit. 

Some tiny section of your brain is yelling that they've probably split up to look for you and this is just your luck. Unfortunately, the rest of your head is screaming things like OF COURSE YOU GET HUNTED DOWN BY THE WALKING OLD SPICE AD and MAYBE YOU'LL GET LUCKY AND HIS LUNGS ARE SWEATING SO PROFUSELY HE DROWNS HIMSELF.  Because he's just standing there, breathing heavily and perspiring heavilier. Heavilier? Welp, goodbye, mental functions. He's moving forward now, and-

"Hold up-"

And the giantic troll sinks to his knees, like you're an oracle. _Thus spake the Strider; thus sank the peasant to his lowly, sweaty knees; thus knee-shaped craters in the floor did form._ You realize verbal communication is probably not the greatest idea right now, and you hold out your hands. Apparently the "don't move" sign is Alternian for "come at me, bro" because he makes a clumsy lungeish thing. Good thing you're quicker than he is, because he propels himself into the screens you were standing in front of. There's an avalanche of sparks and he sinks down, creepy dazed half-smile still stuck on his face. You're not sure if sweating is a vital sign, but if it is he's just fine. 

Cool reclaimed, you exit, stepping over the mangled corpse of the door. Of course your first contender had been a Smurfed version of Bruce Banner. Time to find the others. Also time to never open your mouth again. 


	3. aradia

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> gigantic lesbian Aeries crush? 
> 
> who, me?

You flashstep back towards the meeting room, or in the generalish direction. This place is pretty much a maze of steel and obscure scientific horsecrap. Wasn't the protagonist of this trope supposed to have yarn or some shit leading him home? No, scratch that idea, because if you're Theseus in this analogy that would make the Minotaur-

All trains of thought are promptly blown the fuck up as you are hoisted into the air and slammed backwards into a wall. 

The stale filtered oxygen is quashed out of your lungs. Sucking in much-needed air, you look up and into eyes that are as white as fucking Colgate. Like somebody had set Scrubbing Bubbles to work on her pupils. You could go on with the bathroom-product metaphors, but she's interrupted you before you can do some sort of Texan voodoo voice slide right out of this situation. You are all fucking sorts of excited at having to stay splayed on the wall until this is over.

"You obviously have some sort of verbal mastery over Alternian think pans." Her voice has a strange warm empty quality, like her vocal cords are brass. "I want more, even if I know I don't want more. It's euphoria. Now talk." 

You boggle eloquently. 

She's powerful. No shit, you suppose, but with her floating in front of you with a poker face a Strider could envy and hubcap-sized hornage, you kind of feel like you should obey this girl. "Please talk. If I have to hurt you the others will have an easier time finding you, and I don't think I'll still want this when they're done."

You talk. It's long and pointless, but you don't think verbosity is the name of the game here. She keeps hovering there, eyes twitching slightly. It starts with "Fellow time chica" and you're halfway though a beautiful fucking dissertation on chocolate coins when a burning line of _owfuckow_ wraps around your neck and you slump to the floor like a lead marionette. You look up, rubbing your throat, to see your puppetmaster snap back her whip and sink fairly clumsily back onto her feet. That was maybe six minutes of your improv babble, and she looks like an acid trip walked up and kicked her in the cognitive functions. You would get up, but there's residual telekinesis pinning your back to the wall. So much for a quick getaway while she's riding high on the Strider tsunami. 

Aradia's taking slow breaths, and you can hear the occasional shudder in them. It's halfway between a crippling disability and a badass superpower, you think. Maybe you should go get tights, underwear, a cape, and crutches. You can pacify trolls at will but they love the pacifier. Like babies with a binky kink? And then the pressure holding you back is off and she's back to normal, staring at you like she doesn't know whether to bow to you or preserve you in a bottle, as you push yourself back to your feet. 

Staring at her eye-to-eye, her being nearly as tall as you if you don't count the horns, you think about making some fittingly snarky comment. Her whip hand looks pretty damn twitchy, though, she's either gonna combust or–

Break into a full-on grin. Uh, okay then. Suddenly her hair is wild and her eyebrows are clever and her horns look less like ovaries and more like something majestic, something you'd see standing at the top of a gaggingly picturesque hill in Scotland, and then she's gone. A swish of deteriorated skirt out one of the doors and down a hall and away.

Well...

okay. 

Minotaur, you win this round. 


	4. nepeta

In short: you get your rear into fucking turbo gear, track down Rose and the derptasticos, and with their help, find a secluded room in an obscure corner of the laboratory complex. The four of you file inside and let out breaths you've been clutching to your chests for too long.

Jade breaks the relieved silence. "D'you guys think any of them followed us?????"

You're going to have to place some sort of limit on her verbal punctuation. 

"I rather think not. They are going to be searching the entire meteorite for Dave, though. This probably won't remain safe for too long." Rose is calmer than she should be.

"Oid." You're leaning back against an impassive wall. 

"Pardon?" Lalonde turns her lavender headlamps on you. 

"Meteoroid."

"Thank you. That was possibly the most vital addition possible to the conversation we're having at present." 

"Shush, guys! We can't fight! We've got to band together and give this a happy ending!" John's earnest as ever.

"Do I get to ride into the sunset with the prince of my dreams?"

"Shut up, Dave, you know Rose is going to waste at least six pages of journal space on your homoerotic comments. Seriously though, how do we stop this?" If he had a goatee, John would be stroking it into submission. 

"Dave, maybe you could lose your accent??" Jade keeps looking nervously at the door. 

"Born and bred a Houston smoothtalker, Harley. Scrub all the sandpaper you like on the smooth of my talk, it'll still slide right into the 'whoa man, the walls have ears' section of the Alternian thinkglob." 

Lalonde's fingers are twitching for a pen and a psychoanalysis log. 

The three bid their farewells. Well, Jade stranglehugs you, John wishes you luck through his toothridden facehole, and Rose says something bitingly and predictably wry. You guess they're off to mack on their patron trolls, which reminds you of Terezi. Or, more specifically, Terezi's teeth. All six jillion of them.  The fact that you're stuck on a meteor(oid) with a dozen feral trolls who want to rip out your voice box and cuddle it punches you in the _well okay guess I'm fucked_ gland. 

You get a good six hours of sleep and a not as good two hours of being bored of gray walls and imagining your epitaph and needing to pee. You're reclining on something that could either be a narrow bed or a condiment shelf, eyes closed behind shades, when there's a flurry of dropping cloth and way more weight than your ribcage wants to handle drops onto your chest. You make the smoothtalkiest of oof noises.  

"And the hidden panther takes down the unsuspecting draggy-voiced human! Earth meatfeast fur her tonight!" 

You open your mouth and then shut it. You haven't read the etiquette book on What To Do With Eighty-Odd Pounds Of Kittytroll On Your Torso. Looking up, you guess she's been on top of that ventilation pipe, waiting for the right moment to crush your lungs. 

"Oh, the human prey doesn't want to yowl?" She pawts-POUTS. She pouts. 

Okay, minus the foot-long clawblades, she looks a little less... volatile than your last opponents. Maybe it's time for a new tactic. 

"Oh, I'll yowl all I want. I'm gonna sing like a goddamn canary." The moment you begin speaking, her knees are off your chest and she's crushing your small intestine instead, a vacant look on her face. "'Cept this canary's a parrot and Polly's fucking done with crackers." Yeah, you're not sure what that meant, but it sounded pretty fucking cool. "Just wait right here and Daddy Dave's gonna lullabye you into the land of nod." You push her shoulder and she slumps to the side, leaning against the wall, and you can slide off the bedshelf and out from under her. "Gonna go warm you up a glass of milk. Or cream, I guess." Her eyes make a halfhearted attempt to follow you out of the room as you slide out the door, still talking. 

You close the door and stick half a shitastic katana through the handles for good measure before you stop speaking. Leaning against it, you hear nothing but silence. Then four jagged blue claws punch directly through the metal beside your head and there's a world of pseudo-feline screeching and hey now sounds like a great time to abscond your ass right out of nyantroll territory. You do that.


	5. vriska

There's a good fifteen minutes of your flashiest flashstepping and corners turned on whims between you and catgirl. You're getting pretty good at this whole abscond thing by now. Or, at least, that what you're thinking before your brain, which suddenly isn't yours anymore, decides to turn your feet around and walk you in a random direction. Which must look pretty goddamn dignified, your feet moving inexorably in one direction while your flailing hands reach for pipes and ledges and shit, anything that'll keep your bottom half from dragging you to whatever marigold-horned doom is next on the menu. It's like somebody's reeling you in, which gives you a pretty clear idea of who wants your words to themself this time.

Sure as skittles, the next corner you turn reveals arachnotroll in all her envy-my-mind-shit glory. She's even picked the most dramatic room possible, all sparkling glass dome of suns shining yonder. Color you impressed. She's grinning like she wants to rub in your face how badass her fangs are compared to your omnivore teeth. Fuck you too, Serket, you must've had one hell of a painful time sucking your thumb when you were a maggot or some shit like that. Your body is piloted into a kneeling position in font of her. Nice try, Alterniae Araneae. You can sleep in the immaculately ironed t-shirt of Strider dignity all you like, but that shit don't wrinkle. Besides, if nipple level is the same thing as sea level, you're a happy little periscope right about now. She leans forward to speak in your face. You beat her to it.

"What, spidergirl wants some sick Strider vocals? 'Cause these utterances are straight-up bedridden." She sways and you can feel chinks forming in the mental vice around your brain, but before you can do anything your left hand comes up to slap you hard across the face.

Oh, shit just graduated from irritating to personal. Arachnofreak needs to learn that a guy's left hand is his best friend and you do not turn somebody's best friend on them like that.

"Like I was _about to say,_ boy, others beat me to your voice. And I don't like being beat. Soooooooo..." She raises you to her height. "Now you talk!" The mental binds around your jaw loosen. 

Nuh uh. You've already done the ESP dominatrix thing, and the Aeries chick was at least interesting. None of this gimmicky Peter-Parker-with-a-rack shit. The dial has officially been cranked up to eleven. 

"Fine." You clear your throat and unleash a torrent of rap directly at her, syllables dragged out with an extra helping of drawl and a nice tall glass of sultry. It's a stupid half-memorized thing you're patching up with improv as you go, but you can feel her cranial stranglehold fracturing as your sentences hammer into her own skull. Your inflections make her weak at the knees, your stretched vowels exploding in sparks behind her eyes. Spider, I am the rolled up newspaper of your doom, and today's front-page story is fuck you. 

The last bits of her mindgrip fall away like Hershey's Magic Shell. She's in her own happy place now, stunned and slumped on the metal floor from your extra-enthusiastic verbal attack. You brush down what would have been lapels if you were wearing something classier than a t-shirt, turn around, and waltz directly into your sister and her Nosferatu girlfriend thing. 

Traitor. 


	6. kanaya

Well, fuck.

Rose smiles a tiny plastic smile, icing on a Lacanian cake. 

"I do hope you won't mind terribly that we're interrupting your Twelve Herculean Labors, but we'd like to strike a deal." 

You quirk an eyebrow. You know Maryam's the spectrum slurper or whatever, and a voice in your head shrieking OH MY GOD D4V3 JU1C3 3V3RYWH3R3 TH4NK YOU K4N4Y4 BRB GONN4 CH3RRYG45M keeps you from opening your stupid mouth. 

"It's perfectly fine to talk." Rose nudges Kanaya, prompting her to turn so that you can see small wads of fabric in her ears. 

"Gonna have to respectfully disagree there. Do you have any idea how many argyrian looking motherfuckers I've had to strife today?" 

"We're hoping to remedy that." She sweeps, beckoning, through the doorway. Kanaya follows. You look back at the twitching spidergirl, through to the room with the girl who wants to suck your thoughts dry and the girl who wants to suck your jugular dry, and up at the needle-bright stars. Twinkly little bastards. You brace your brain and follow Thelma and Louise. 

They're sitting at one of the featureless tables. You can already tell Rose is going to be Doing The Talking. Your sister's specialty is The Talking. Lalonde strolls into a room, the talking is well and truly about to Be Done. 

She smiles, again. It makes you want to throttle her. In a loving and brotherly way. "We– Kanaya and I– would like to propose a stalemate of sorts." 

"She gets a pint of Strider grenadine and I get fashion tips?" 

"You get a bulwark. Kanaya believes her enhanced rainbow drinker capabilities should provide enough willpower to resist your... Southern charms, if you will. And if it does prove to have an effect on her, I believe I can hold her off long enough for you to get away." She folds her hands on the table. "We'd like to test this." 

"You want to toss lab rat Dave in with the vamp." 

"If you're the lab rat, I must say you do have the eyes for it." She fucking twinkles at you, and then tips her head to Maryam. Sapphotroll (Sagpho?) pulls out the neat wads of cloth with pointed claws and looks to you to begin. 

"Fuck it, okay." And you have just enough time to think _ohshit_ before two yellow pupils twitch and, faster than anything should be, she backhands your sister into the wall and oh hello she didn't have a chainsaw in that hand before did she.

You can truthfully say that never in your life have you seen a glowing troll rev up a chainsaw while licking her chops. Welp, now you have. 

You _can_ truthfully say you would really fucking like for her to look you in the eye instead of in the neck. 

She's leaping at you, but you flashstep under the screeching chainsaw blades and out the door. Which, you realize, leads to the skydome wherein Spidertroll is having fabulous adventures in the land of goddamn Nod. You also realize there's no other doorway leading out. 

Scene: Dave Strider, who is valiantly not pissing his pants, facing off with Casper the Troll, who is valiantly not mincing him into chum. You have a total of zero brilliant ideas about what to do now and three horrible ideas. You are about to shoot for Horrible Idea Two (the one involving Serket and 1/2 bladekind and you being reincarnated as a juicebox for glowtroll), when–

"Kanaya." Lalonde is in the doorway, needles out. There's a nice hearty bruise forming along her hairline. She starts walking towards the rainbow drinker, and fuck if you don't believe in magic now, because the chainsaw is whirring to a stop and eurgh okay do they have to hug in front of you. 

Scene: expanse of glimmering stars, under which your ectosister and her ladytroll have decided to hug it out. It's a deeply touching scene. 

You whisper "Thanks, Buffy," in Rose's ear. 

And then you get the fresh hell out of there. 


	7. tavros & gamzee

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> oh god why couldn't i have just left this fic to die

     You make your getaway before Embraceathon ends and Rose and Maryam are presented with their nice shiny gold medals. Keeping to the shadows as well as you can, you point in what seems the right direction and go. You've already gotten pummeled by a rainbow of trolls already– how much worse can things get?

Your mental narration deserves a mace to the crotch for that last thought. 

Right on cue, you round a corner and run facefirst into a goalpost. Judging from the symbol color and the huge, teary eyes, you'd guess this guy to be the one with the sick fires and shift-key confusion. Maybe you can get out of another confrontation by fining him for comma abuse. 

He starts out with "Uh," shockingly. The judges are less than impressed. 

"Look, um. Please, don't run or anything? I, I don't think you get, that we sort of need this, and uh, it'd be really kind of great of none of us got–"

You wheel around. A row of freaky alabaster-pale lusii, still dripping slightly in the clear rank stuff their jars are full of, are advancing slightly. Each one has a little Taurus tramp stamp on its forehead. 

Fuck. 

When you turn around, Nitram has a little less terror and a little more effort in his eyes, fists clenched and horntips angled in your direction. You're officially going to end up either A) gored or B) casserole. 

The lusii close ranks and form a circle. The eyeless alien mommies are close, now, close enough that is you reached out you'd be able to stroke their scales/feathers/fur/tentacles/all of the above. 

"Look," you start out, "as splendid as your little petting zoo is," but you don't get any farther than that because lines of absolute terror are zipping up your spine, tailbone to brainstem and back again. 

From behind Tavros steps the most horrific face you've ever seen, which you belatedly realize is facepaint plastered across the most horrifically stoned juggalo on the meteor(oid). And there aren't many juggalos around, unless Maryam slipped up and drenched herself in glowworm shit instead of greasepaint. 

Makara grins in slo-mo. You can see the headlines already: ILLUSTRIOUS DAVE STRIDER'S VOICE BOX RIPPED OUT BY PARAPLEGIC AND LANKY ASSHOLE. The only evidence are wheelchair tracks and a bloody polaroid showing half a Rorschach-bukkake'd face. Authorities are baffled. 

"Wouldn't talk, brother." The clown sounds like Darth Vader after two hours in a Mendocino forest fire. "It's probably best to just, you know, follow us." 

They take a step (a wheel) backwards, and so does the entire ring of animal crackers. Tendrils of fear flicker and grasp at your sternum when you stand unmoving. 

You decide on a whim to maybe kinda follow them. 

"See, uh," says veal-on-wheels as he and Ronald McDoobie move back a little more, "we're kinda exposed in this hall, here, so, a more sec–" He pauses and squints a little as his forehead power thingy wavers, "Secluded, location, is probably, ah, best." 

Very convincing Goldfinger impression. Wild applause. 

The circle of bleach-white lusii expands and contracts as you move slowly through echoing hallways and past looming steel doors. The trolls watch you the entire way, moving backwards little by little, leading you to a one-sided rap battle doom. Probably. You shuffle forward with a gentle noose of fear around you (shitno don't think of hangmen, Terezi is not who you want in your head right now). It gets pretty boring after half an hour, and you raise a hand and do the Strider version of an ooh-ooh-pick-me face. The fear contracts a little, making you cringe internally. You put your hand back down. 

Forty-nine minutes in and you're totally convinced this is the least interesting hostage situation any kidnapee's ever been in. They didn't even have the decency to pretty you up in duct tape and punt you into the trunk of an old Lincoln. 

Punt, uh, punt is a throw, right. Bitches love flawless sports terminology. 

You're not-so-subtly stifling a yawn when there's a sudden, high-pitched yelp, and the terrorvoodoo bullshit makes you convulse with stabbing fear for a moment, and then it's gone. Rapidly fading thumps and grunts die away and the bright-white fauna around you disperse. Moving forward cautiously in the metallic gloom, you peer over a step. Your captors have taken a gravity-fueled shortcut down a long flight of stairs, and they lie crumpled and unconscious at the bottom like an expired Uncrustable. Makara is splayed like a tube of paint that's been stomped on. The Marble Whisperer's wheelchair lies on its side, one wheel spinning desolately. 

You get it now. This was all set up by the universe. The real trial is resisting what you're about to say. 

You can't help yourself. 

"Could've warned you about the stairs, bros." 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> for all y'all non-Bay Area folks, the Mendocino crack was because the woods there are more cannabis than redwood. the streams run THC and the dewdrops show you the future. i tell no lies.


End file.
